Mordeen wrote:- He's all but completely absent from the promotion of the show in a significant way
- He releases the first book and makes a point on his book tour of contradicting specific facts from the show in his introductory monologues
- Lynch pointedly says the books are "Mark's version"
- Cast members confide that Lynch rewrote scenes on the spot, going wildly off script
- He did this to Mark with the Episode 29 script, literally tearing out the heart of what Mark wrote, which caused a rift between them that lasted decades
First of all, it’s good to see you back!
Second, with all deference to you and your sources, who undeniably provided good information but also (by your own admission) some unreliable information, I just want to address each of these points....
- I agree. It is weird that Mark all but disappeared from promotion while the show was on the air (although he was very active both immediately before and after the show was airing). The L/F dynamic has always confused me. They almost never appear together, and it’s difficult for me to even envision them interacting. However, when I met Mark on the tour for TSHoTP, he seemed extremely enthusiastic about the show and DKL’s vision, and that has continued in his interviews and podcast appearances since the show has ended. Also, the official story for his disappearance from the set is that he has wanted to write a “history of TP” book since the ‘90s (a documented fact — he mentioned it in interviews at the time, and the Access Guide is clearly a dry run), and he decided to go off and take his opportunity while DKL shot the show. The reality may be more nuanced, and you might have more detailed insider info...but on its face, this explanation for his absence from the set sounds reasonable to me.
- I’m not sure what in particular you are saying he contradicted in his book tour intro. I saw him in Manhattan, and the only oddity in the intro was Lana winning Miss Twin Peaks — which contradicts S2, not TP:TR. TFD certainly has some weird conflicts with TP:TR. However, while that book contradicts certain things about TP:TR, both books also WILDLY contradict events from the original show — including episodes Mark himself show-ran, which DKL has essentially disavowed. If Frost really wanted to stick it to DKL, he would have fully committed to his own canon, instead of playfully twisting it. I don’t think anything can be read into any canonical departures from TP:TR in the books, since they play pretty fast and loose with even internal consistency (Robert Jacoby’s multiple death dates, etc.), and alternate realities are clearly at play.
- DKL has also told his own daughter he has no interest in reading TSDoLP. It’s not personal. He doesn’t want anything to pollute his highly personal vision of TP, and anyone who has read enough interviews with him understands how fragile he views his creative worlds to be. He likes to place the dust under the radiator himself, as it were.
- DKL departs from the scripts and improvises on set on most of his films, both those he fully wrote and those he cowrote. We wouldn’t have Bob if not for a reflection in a mirror. This doesn’t necessarily mean Mark is resentful. He has embraced many of DKL’s improvised elements, like Bob and the Red Room, as indispensable parts of the canon.
- Both Frost and Lynch have said that E29 was a huge influence on the basic conception of the new show. Whatever resentment Frost may have had about DKL throwing out the original E29 script, he has since acknowledged that what ended up onscreen was a vast improvement.
All that being said, in DKL’s biography Room to Dream, Tony Krantz (the agent who first united L/F) repeatedly says that Frost was jealous of DKL getting all the credit in the 1990s. It is certainly possible that history repeated itself, and Frost again found himself feeling resentful during the filming of TP:TR. But all of your bulletpoints are speculative and don’t meaningfully support this conclusion, IMO, and at the very least, Frost has kept a good game-face about being very enthusiastic regarding the final product.